Ingmar Bergman’s Dreams

No other art medium–neither painting nor poetry–can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can. When the lights go down in the cinema and this white shining point opens up for us, our gaze stops flitting hither and thither, settles and becomes quite steady. We just sit there, letting the images flow out over us. Our will ceases to function. We lose our ability to sort things out and fix them in their proper places. We’re drawn into a course of events–we’re participants in a dream. And manufacturing dreams, that’s a juicy business.

Ingmar Bergman

Mai Zetterling in a dream sequence of the early Ingmar Bergman’s melodrama Musik i Mörker (Music in Darkness, 1948)

The drama had its origin in a dream. I depicted the dream in the flashback about Frost (Anders Ek) and Alma (Gudrun Brost). Gycklarnas Afton (Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953)